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Pirate Radio

Set aboard a floating radio station in the North Sea, **Richard Curtis’**s new comedy, Pirate Radio, is an amusing love song to mid-sixties rock. Rising English star Tom Sturridge plays Carl, a mop-haired young virgin whose mother (Emma Thompson) sends him to live with his godfather, Quentin (Bill Nighy), on his ship, Radio Rock, which broadcasts back to Britain the pop music that’s allowed on the BBC only two hours each day. The moment he arrives, Carl is plunged into the rowdy world of the boat’s deejays, a collection of cutups led by a bearishly avuncular American, The Count (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and his English archrival, the lady-killing Gavin, played by an unexpectedly attractive Rhys Ifans. This group of merry pranksters spends its time bickering, carousing, and, when lucky, getting it on with assorted groupies (including January Jones, who looks to be having a better time here than she ever does on Mad Men). Trouble is, back on shore, the politicians want to close down their little utopia—especially one killjoy minister, nicely played by Kenneth Branagh, and his assistant named Twatt (a gag Curtis would surely like to have back). With its ensemble of high-spirited troublemakers, Pirate Radio aims to be a British cross between M*A*S*H and Animal House. But it’s neither as daring nor as disciplined as either. The movie has been substantially cut since its release in the U.K., where it was called The Boat that Rocked, and though the scenes now fly by, the action often feels frustratingly choppy. Curtis has assembled a superb cast, and I kept wanting to see more of Hoffman, Ifans, and especially the incomparable Nighy, who is acting’s version of Ariel—he touches even his most prosaic parts with magic. Instead, we’re bombarded with mortifying reaction shots (for instance, British teenagers listening to their transistors and dancing in the kitchen) that are there to remind us that Radio Rock is really shaking things up. What keeps the movie afloat is what kept that era afloat: great songs by bands like the Kinks, the Stones, the Hollies, and the Troggs, not to mention their New World counterparts. Although Curtis has no great instinct for rock-and-roll rebellion, he does have a genuine love for the music; he appreciates the way it can enter, and liberate, people’s lives. As one who was a Midwestern kid in this era, I remember how hearing British Invasion songs on the radio felt like my lifeline to a freer, richer, more enjoyable world than the one I was actually living in. Messy it may be, but Pirate Radio pays an exuberantly off-key tribute to those less niche-marketed years when bands like the Who could take a whole culture by storm, opening doors for far more people than just those in their own g-g-g-generation.